“At KS3, pupils are taught the traditional techniques of drawing and painting and Art history. Lessons are ‘teacher-led’ as we believe it is the only way pupils can learn the appropriate skills to an expert level. Teachers show pupils exactly how to use each media in-depth step-by-step using the visualizer. There is no ‘guess work’ at Michaela. Pupils get to practice using the same media over and over again until the technique is mastered and perfected.”

“If you love art and know how to teach drawing, come and visit us at Michaela. If you are in two minds, it is worth seeing what can be achieved in art when using our teaching methods.”

And it also states:

“We don’t offer lessons in ICT, DT..”

A full account of the Michaela guide to Mastery in Art and Music education can be found here.

But by yet another All Change Please!(Patent Applied For) Amazing Coincidence it seems that the nearby, and entirely fictitious, MichaelGova Community School is also recruiting further teaching staff for its Art Department. Somehow All Change Please! has exclusively managed to obtain a draft of the forthcoming press advertisement:

“At The MichaelGova ‘ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS’ Community School, Art is about painting nice pictures over and over again until they look just like the work of great artists. We know everything about Art, but we don’t know what we like. An unkind visitor once upset some of our children by telling them that Art was about creating challenging new disruptive ideas, taking risks and being spontaneous and expressing oneself. He then spouted some mumbo-jumbo, snake-oil, neuromyth-nonsense that Art involved exploration, improvisation and messy experimentation in situations where there are no correct answers and that guessing and being intuitive were important in the real world. We asked him to leave the building immediately and never darken our doors again.

Pupils who in any way question what or how they are told to draw or paint are immediately isolated from other children and sent for a series of lunchtime re-progamming sessions in the Visualiser.

Meanwhile we take pride in refusing to teach our pupils anything about technology or problem-solving, knowing that they will be completely unprepared for life in the real, modern world. But as they will all become Oxbridge graduates unsuitable for any type of employment except for being a politician or a teacher in schools like ours, that won’t matter at all.

If you are in two minds about MichaelGova, please don’t apply. We only employ single-minded teachers.”